How can a Medical Billing Company End your Struggle with Meaningful Use?

Physicians across the US continue to struggle with implementation of Health IT and Meaningful Use, failing to earn incentive payments. Even though CMS is trying to increase the number of providers successfully attesting to Meaningful Use, practices seem to be unprepared for meeting the requirements.

Do you have an underperforming EHR?

Practices struggling to adopt a comprehensive EHR system are also struggling to meet the MU requirements. A significant number of providers who received a Meaningful Use incentive payment in 2011 did not manage to earn the second year incentive in 2012. While there are certain flaws in the program, wrong choice of EHR is also to be blamed for the increasing rate of Meaningful Use dropout.

As per surveys, many providers are dissatisfied with their EHR, planning to change their vendor because their EHR is neither meeting their practice’s needs nor the federal requirements for Meaningful Use Stage 2.

Challenges in achieving Meaningful Use:

• Investment of time and money is required to achieve Meaningful Use. Staff will have to be trained extensively, translating to increased costs for providers. It has been estimated that providers who have or are planning to implement an EHR/EMR will have to bear an expense of more than 20% of their annual IT spending on MU related projects
• Productivity will be affected due to changed workflow and aggressive timeframes
• Incentive payments for eligible providers and hospitals cover only 20-25% of the overall expense to implement EHR and achieve Meaningful Use
• As work pressure will increase on providers, patient care will get affected. Compared to paper, electronic documentation might slow down workflow and physicians will have to do more administrative duties and less clinical work

Small practices or hospitals don’t have the time and money to conduct trial and error with EHR systems. Due to issues and delays, timeline for meaningful use attestation gets limited. Factors like vendor issues, work flow adoption, lack of training pose trouble in sending reminders to patients for preventive and follow-up care. Practices also face challenges in capturing relevant electronic data in hospitals.

There is a strong need for physicians to pay special attention on what should be done for stage 2 of Meaningful Use. Necessary preparation, consultation needs to be done to prepare for the same; however, lack of time, skilled staff and payment cuts have made it difficult for providers to meet the Meaningful Use requirements.

By choosing a billing partner like MBC practices across 50 states in the US have managed to perform successful implementation of EHR and MU requirements. MBC has the largest consortium of billers and coders, helping practices choose the right EHR, mapping process flow, figuring out loopholes in administration, offering effective solutions and enabling providers to set a standard that can be achieved easily through meaningful sources.

The expert team at Medicalbillersandcoders.com not only assists physicians in successful EHR implementation but also ensures maximum revenue and minimum claim denial rate.

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Published By - Medical Billers and Coders
Published Date - Jul-14-2014 Back